Removing invalid characters from XML backups

Added by Jeff Turner, last edited by Jeff Turner on Jul 22, 2005  (view change)
JIRA Documentation

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JIRA 3.1 and above should not suffer from this problem. Invalid characters are automatically stripped from imported data

In older versions of JIRA it was possible to cut & paste text containing control characters into JIRA issue fields. This causes problems, because JIRA's backup format is XML, and XML does not allow for the storage of most control characters . When XML containing control characters is imported into JIRA, the import fails with an error:

To fix this, one needs to remove the control characters from the JIRA backup file. This can be done as follows:

  • Download atlassian-xml-cleaner-0.1.jar
  • Open a DOS console or shell, and locate the XML or ZIP backup file on your computer, here assumed to be called jiradata.xml
  • Run:

    java -jar atlassian-xml-cleaner-0.1.jar jiradata.xml > jiradata-clean.xml

    This will write a copy of jiradata.xml to jiradata-clean.xml, with invalid characters removed. You should now be able to import jiradata-clean.xml without problems.

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